The body of Canwest journalist Michelle Lang is carried to a hearse during a repatriation ceremony at Trenton Ontario's CFB Trenton, Sunday January 3, 2010.Peter J. Thompson
/ National Post

A family member and friend look on after the body of Canwest journalist Michelle Lang was carried to a hearse during a repatriation ceremony at Trenton Ontario's CFB Trenton, Sunday January 3, 2010.Peter J. Thompson
/ National Post

The body of Canwest journalist Michelle Lang is carried to a hearse during a repatriation ceremony at Trenton Ontario's CFB Trenton, Jan. 3, 2010.Peter J. Thompson / National Post
/

The body of Canwest journalist Michelle Lang is carried to a hearse during a repatriation ceremony at Trenton Ontario's CFB Trenton, Sunday January 3, 2010.Peter J. Thompson
/ National Post

The body of Canwest journalist Michelle Lang is carried to a hearse during a repatriation ceremony at Trenton Ontario's CFB Trenton on Sunday. Lang and Canadian servicemen Sgt. George Miok, Sgt. Kirk Taylor, Pte. Garrett Chidley and Cpl. Zachery McCormack were killed in an improvised explosive device blastPeter J. Thompson
/ Canwest News Service

Michael Louie (centre), fiance of Canwest reporter Michelle Lang, and family members take part in a repatriation ceremony at Trenton Ontario's CFB Trenton, Sunday January 3, 2010.Peter J. Thompson
/ National Post

Family and friends take part in a repatriation ceremony for Canwest reporter Michelle Lang at Trenton Ontario's CFB Trenton, Sunday January 3, 2010. Lang, Canadian servicemen Sgt. George Miok, Sgt. Kirk Taylor, PTE. Garrett Chidley and CPL. Zachery McCormack where killed in an improvised explosive device bPeter J. Thompson
/ National Post

The casket of journalist Michelle Lang of the Calgary Herald is carried into a hearse at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Ont., on Jan. 3, 2010.Screen shot
/ Global TV

A Canadian soldier says goodbye to a fallen comrade on New Year's Day before he and three comrades as well as journalist Michelle Lang of the Calgary Herald begin their 10,000 kilometre journey back to Canada. Lang and the soldiers were killed on Wednesday when the armoured vehicle they were traveling in stDND photo by Sgt. Gemma Bibby of the Royal Air Force.
/

CFB TRENTON, Ont. — Four days after their deaths from a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan, the remains of four soldiers and the first Canadian journalist killed during the eight-year war were returned home Sunday amid an extraordinary outpouring of grief and admiration.

Hundreds of people had converged in the winter chill to show support for the mourning families and for Canada’s gruelling Afghan mission. Despite the biting cold and snow-flecked wind that whipped their hand-held flags, throngs of onlookers lined the fence edging the airbase as the steely grey, CC-150 Polaris aircraft employed to repatriate the fallen Canadians rolled to a stop.

“I believe it’s the least we can do,” said 71-year-old Helga Haecker, who lives just outside of Trenton and says she’s witnessed “almost all” of the repatriation ceremonies at the base. “Each time we hope it’s the last one.”

Lang’s casket was the first to be taken off the military jet, marched slowly through the blowing snow onto the tarmac by eight soldiers in dress uniform, while a bagpiper’s lament filled the air.

As the casket was placed in the waiting hearse, family members huddled against the cold and took turns saying tearful goodbyes, dropping flowers into the back of the vehicle.

Lang’s fiance, Michael Louie, placed a red rose on the casket before dabbing his eyes and rejoining the group of mourners, including Lang’s family and friends and colleagues from the Herald and Canwest News Service, for whom Lang had been working in Afghanistan.

The sombre ceremony was repeated four more times for each of the soldiers, their Maple Leaf-shrouded caskets placed in matching black cars.

The aircraft, which carried the bodies from a NATO base in Germany, was also met at CFB Trenton by an official party that included Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Gen. Walt Natynczyk, Canada’s chief of defence.

Natynczyk saluted while Jean and MacKay were hand-on-heart as the procession of hearses left the base just after 3:30 p.m. Bridges overlooking the stretch of the 401 “Highway of Heroes” between Trenton and Toronto were lined with residents of each community along the way, braving the day’s bitter cold to pay their respects.

The remains of the five, transported Sunday to the provincial coroner’s office in Toronto, will next be released for funeral services in each of the victims’ hometowns.

Sherry VanderVeur was among the first to stand at the overpass in Cobourg, Ont., bringing along a Canadian flag and her two granddaughters “so they know what it means to support our soldiers and the families they left behind.”

The girls’ father, Derek, is in the reserves in Trenton.

“I don’t want my son to go there,” she said, choking back tears.

As the flag waved, cars honked as they drove along the highway.

Glen Sherwood, a Toronto firefighter, stood on the overpass, on his way home from a family visit.

Sherwood’s nephew was in Afghanistan in 2006. After deaths but not names were announced, Sherwood said he would stay up all night, waiting for his nephew’s e-mails, which always read, “I’m alright.”

“Whether you agree with the war or not, you’ve got to support the people over there.”

The sorrowful, 10,000-kilometre journey of the dead began Friday in Afghanistan after a ritual ramp ceremony at Kandahar Airfield, the hub of Canada’s mission to secure the southern part of the war-torn Asian country in the face of a Taliban-led insurgency.

It was on a road just a few kilometres from the Kandahar base, on the outskirts of the city last Wednesday, where the armoured vehicle carrying the Canadian soldiers and Lang — a Herald health reporter who had volunteered for a six-week assignment in Afghanistan for Canwest News Service — was struck by a powerful, improvised bomb that had been buried by insurgents.

The explosion not only killed the four servicemen and Lang — a Vancouver native embedded with troops to observe their patrol and the progress of Canadian reconstruction efforts — but also left four other Canadian Forces personnel and a second civilian injured.

Seven CIA officers and a U.S. security contractor were killed on the same day, when a suicide bomber infiltrated a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, a further sign of the tremendous cost of the multinational effort to stabilize the ravaged country.

Lang became the second Canadian civilian — along with 60-year-old diplomat Glyn Berry, who died in a 2006 bombing — to be killed during the war.

The deaths of Miok, Taylor, McCormack and Chidley pushed the number of Canadian military fatalities in Afghanistan to 138 since 2002, when Canada joined the international coalition aiming to bring peace to the country after the defeat of its terrorist-friendly Taliban regime in 2001.

The conflict was sparked by the deadly terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly 3,000 people — including 24 Canadians — died that day in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania, and the roots of last week’s tragedy in Kandahar can be directly traced to the horrors of 9/11.

Lang was a farm reporter in Saskatchewan when the hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center in New York over eight years ago.

But the story that appeared under her byline in the next day’s Regina Leader-Post recounted a Saskatchewan-born stock broker’s anguish as he watched — from his office across the street in New York — bodies falling from the upper floors of the Twin Towers.

“Through billowing smoke and debris,” the story reported, “he could see people jumping from the burning building.”

Miok and Taylor were just beyond their high school years at the time. Chidley and McCormack hadn’t yet reached Grade 9.

And Lang, a young journalist in the dawning days of a career full of rich promise only partly fulfilled, was soon back to covering news about the effects of a severe drought that dogged Prairie farmers in 2001.

Nearly a decade later, in a world still under the long shadow of 9/11, a fateful sense of duty would lead all five down a dangerous road in Afghanistan and then, on Sunday, along the Highway of Heroes toward home.

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